Joy (2015)

Joy rounds out a kind of thematic trilogy for director David O. Russell, but it’s a trilogy unified more by a stable company of performers – chief among them Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, and Robert De Niro, with a few other bit players recurring in the mix. Of these, preceded by Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, Joy is perhaps the least successful of the lot – not by dint of being an abject failure but by never quite reaching the heights of the other two. Lawrence, however, turns in what might be her best performance yet.

Jennifer Lawrence stars as Joy Mangano, the QVC maven who made her millions with the Miracle Mop, a self-wringing cleaning device borne out of her own frustrations as a single mother living with both her father (Robert De Niro) and her ex-husband (Edgar Ramirez) in the basement. Bradley Cooper has a small supporting role as Neil Walker, the QVC exec who puts Joy’s product into the market.

Joy isn’t going to go down as Russell’s strongest film – I really do think Silver Linings Playbook holds that title – but I do think Lawrence has done her best work as a member of the Russell company, and I would put very real money on her seeing a third Best Actress nomination at the top of next year. As the eponymous Joy, Lawrence is riveting, from her beleaguered moments in the home to her natural charisma before the QVC camera. The film tasks Joy with representing the struggles faced by all women, and Lawrence is more than capable of bearing that weight.

That universality is one of the peculiarities of the film because I can’t help feeling that it would have been more successful had it adhered more strictly to the unique aspects of Joy’s story rather than an attempt to make her “every woman.” For one, I think the QVC sequences are among the best in the film, and I would have preferred this to be more than a small subplot. Russell has an eye for the innate strangeness of the QVC network, and a fuller treatment of that material (including the wonderfully strange cameo of Melissa Rivers as her mother Joan) would have been truly engaging – to say nothing of the chemistry that Lawrence and Cooper clearly have. Honestly, that’s the movie I thought we were getting, but sadly it’s unlikely we’ll see a Joy 2 that fleshes out that relationship in greater depth.

The movie keeps its eye tightly focused on Joy, often to the detriment of the other performers. It’s not that De Niro or Cooper are any less captivating than they usually are – De Niro is scene-stealing, particularly in an early tantrum about his ex-wife’s similarities with a gas leak – it’s more that there is just less of them to captivate. On reflection, it seems the largest supporting role belongs to Isabella Rossellini as Trudy, Joy’s principal investor and commercial mentor of sorts whose idiosyncratic approach to vetting entrepreneurs lends the film one of its greatest moments of empowerment. These moments provide glimpses of the A+ work that Joy might have aspired to be, had it taken off its Lawrence-shaped blinders.

Rotten Tomatoes has the self-congratulatory pun that the film “only sporadically sparks bursts of the titular emotion.” This joke misses the point of the film, because if you wanted a movie about joy you’ll have to check out Pixar’s summer offering Inside Out. This is instead a film about Joy, whose story is told reasonably well here, though the audience rightfully detects that Russell is capable of a fuller film than this. It’s perfectly serviceable, but transcendence belongs to the earlier films in this unofficial trilogy.

Joy is rated PG-13 for “brief strong language.” As might be expected, De Niro gets one F-bomb.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

First of all, if you haven’t seen The Force Awakens just yet, read on without fear of being spoiled (although really, what else did you have to do this weekend?). I’m very sensitive to the fact that this is a film with a heavy curtain of secrecy around it. The spoilers are out there if you really want them, but I’d advise anyone to go into The Force Awakens with a clean palate because this is a film that works best when it washes over you and introduces itself to you on its own terms. It’s a remarkable achievement, breathing new life into a franchise that needed it, setting a fantastic tone for the forthcoming Disney era.

Again, no spoilers here, so I’ll refrain from the usual plot synopsis, only to say that the film’s opening title crawl is immensely captivating stuff, clicking into place a lot of the rumors and official releases such that you have an instant sense of the state of that galaxy far, far away these thirty years after Return of the Jedi. In addition to the familiar faces of Han Solo (Harrison Ford), Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), and Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) – listed in the order they’re credited on the film – The Force Awakens introduces us to a new trio: stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega), scavenger Rey (Daisy Ridley), and hotshot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac). And menacing the galaxy is one more black-clad acolyte of the dark side, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), and the First Order’s plan to unseat the Republic.

I found myself thinking immediately of the words of Obi-Wan Kenobi from Return of the Jedi: “You cannot escape your destiny.” And while I’m on record as being one of those moviegoers who ordinarily detests the deus ex machina of destiny, it’s undeniably woven into the fabric of the Star Wars universe, and director JJ Abrams does some very intriguing work with it. Throughout The Force Awakens, we have characters who are either running from their destiny or sprinting headlong toward it, and all of them end up pretty much exactly where they are meant to be – from the stormtroopers in the opening scene to the folks present in the final shot of the film (and what a gorgeous, sweeping final shot it is). Heck, even Greg Grunberg, a childhood friend of Abrams, fulfills his destiny by appearing here as an X-wing pilot.

JJ Abrams had the unenviable task of being the only person to direct a Star Wars film without George Lucas's hand on his shoulder (including, of course, The Clone Wars and that horrible thing I watched last Friday). While I’ve never been a full Abrams disciple, there’s no question that he more than lives up to the legacy of the original trilogy. (As for the prequels, they’re largely set aside, save for one passing reference.) As a director, Abrams keeps the pace of the film at an even clip, sprinkling in enough humor to make this possibly the funniest Star Wars film in the saga without compromising the film’s overall tone. More apparent is the film’s reverential and referential attitude toward the original trilogy; nearly every sequence in the film has some callback to a previous moment, giving lie to George Lucas’s oft-quoted refrain about the poetry of the saga. But what’s remarkable here is that the aggregate effect isn’t one of plagiarism; there’s a deference, to be sure, to what came before, but it advances the saga forward and cues up more than enough for Episodes VIII and IX to continue to explore.

Bizarrely, and actually gratefully, I’m more interested in the new characters than in the returning faces. Yes, there’s a wonderful reintroduction moment for every returning character (even the ones you weren’t expecting to be applause-worthy), but the Finn-Rey-Poe trio could easily be the new Luke-Leia-Han for this generation, and not necessarily in that order. This is great news for the franchise as a whole, because it shows that Star Wars is capable of sustaining itself beyond the inevitable first flash of nostalgia that The Force Awakens was always destined (there’s that word again) to invoke. And say what you want about the prequels, but they always pointed to A New Hope, never sufficiently building their own world (save for those long and tedious political conversations). The Force Awakens propels the narrative forward, to say nothing of the introduction of an equally compelling trio (or quartet, depending on how you do the math) of antagonists. Let’s just say this – Kylo Ren is everything we wanted from Hayden Christensen’s Anakin Skywalker.

I’ll have to see the film again to give a more detailed assessment – I know there are folks chomping at the bit to talk about some of the more spoileriffic details – and I’d like to revisit the film with more of the John Williams score under my belt. I was just too overwhelmed by the film to drink it all in at once. And that’s such a good thing. I felt myself smiling like a child again once those blue words “A long time ago...” appeared on the screen, felt my jaw fall as the title crawl clued me into the story. I smiled, I laughed, I gasped, and I very nearly cried in a few moments, and not only out of sadness when the film went for the emotional tug. My eyes were misty because I felt, finally, I’d come home. Chills up my arms, chokes in my throat (not the kind induced by the dark side, mind you), and a permanent grin across my face: these were the feelings The Force Awakens conjured up in me. Like some magical incantation, cast out across the void of decades, Star Wars is back.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is rated PG-13 for “sci-fi action violence.” This film is slightly bloodier than previous Star Wars films, but the level of violence and action is about the same.

The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)

Last night while the rest of the world slept, fans across the country were united in projecting their hopes, dreams, and imaginations against the latest – and, some have said, greatest – Star Wars film.

This is not a review of that film. This is a review written by a very confused, very dissatisfied Star Wars fan who, for the first and likely last time in his life, inflicted upon himself the horror, the horror, that is The Star Wars Holiday Special from 1978.

Any attempt to summarize the plot of The Star Wars Holiday Special, such as it is, would be doomed to inevitable failure. Suffice it to say that something has happened to prevent Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) from attending some kind of festivity (the nebulously defined “Life Day”), leading the audience to be held captive for a series of bizarre and senseless vignettes which can only loosely be defined as tangentially relevant to the Star Wars universe, including the sale of a mustache groomer, a Wookiee cooking/drag show, a kaleidoscopic sex drug, and the first appearance of Boba Fett, which is in no way, shape, or form worth sitting through this monstrosity.

To say that this film is unwatchable by modern standards would be to pay The Star Wars Holiday Special a compliment. It is, in fact, unwatchable by any standards of any generation ever. Ten minutes in, I was already not sure whether what I had seen – an interminably long segment which consists of an apparent Married With Children script done entirely in Wookiee-speak followed by a hallucinatory juggling act with Chewbacca’s bloated son Lumpy as voyeur – was actually real or whether I had somehow died on the way home that evening and dreamt up the rest.

The Holiday Special – a poor name indeed, for it is neither festive nor special –  is so catastrophically mystifying that it is a great wonder that Star Wars became the fan-fueled juggernaut that it is today. One wonders how many fans looked at this thing and never returned to that galaxy far, far away, for fear of getting another Holiday Special as recompense for their entertainment dollar. After twenty-five minutes, I felt so insensate that I wondered if Jar Jar Binks might show up as the least offensive thing on the screen. That’s right; a racist cartoon rabbit would not only fit in perfectly in the milieu of the Holiday Special, but might actually have been the most entertaining part of it. Wrap the ethical centers of your brain around that one.

Thirty minutes in, I had to go to the bathroom. I considered leaving it run in my absence, wondering if it would make a difference. I started asking myself a lot of questions. Would I miss anything of merit? (No.) How the hell did they get Art Carney to appear in this travesty? Was this still canon, in the wake of the Great Disney Purge? Had it ever been canon? What had become of my life that I was thinking so deeply about this thing at eleven at night? Could I ever enjoy anything ever again?

Halfway through the Holiday Special, my computer abruptly restarted itself. A scan of my computer revealed no corrupted processes, no viruses, no malware. It is as if my computer refused to suffer any further indignity by playing a moment more of the Holiday Special than was absolutely necessary, as if it wished to spare me the perpetual suffering. As I verified that my computer wasn’t irreparably damaged by the experience, I found myself at a crossroads. I could go to bed, post the review as if I’d seen the whole thing. No one would know. No one would ever have to know, and I’d probably be doing myself a favor. But, equal parts stubborn and honest, I soldiered on.

Thank heavens I did. Not because the animated segment lived up to any expectations at all. No, I’m thankful I didn’t give up so that I’m never tempted to sit through this thing again. I can now say that I’ve watched the first appearance of Boba Fett, and the cartoon episode which interrupts the Holiday Special is as shambolic, plotless, and pointless as anything else in the ninety-some minutes of my life I’m never getting back. Then there’s a strange scene in which Bea Arthur cuddles with a hamster while tending bar at the Mos Eisley Cantina, in which the set and the costuming look even cheaper than their playfully hokey appearance in the original Star Wars film.

It’s at this moment in the Holiday Special that my mind returns to inquisition. Is this thing meant to be funny? Coherent? It’s certainly neither, though there are moments that playact at the former. In short, what the hell is this thing supposed to be, and on what level did anyone look at the finished product and say, “Yep, that’s something I want the rest of the world to see”? If this film was so much as shown a picture of a cohesive narrative, it wasn’t looking. It’s as if George Lucas had a child with David Lynch, and then that child were given a box of Star Wars action figures and a Betamax video camera, and then that child snorted a tremendous amount of cocaine and passed out. The Star Wars Holiday Special is that fever dream.

Thank God I’m going to see The Force Awakens in a matter of hours. I had said of the new film, “It can’t be worse than The Phantom Menace.” What I should have said was, “It can’t be as unfathomably inaccessible as The Star Wars Holiday Special.”

The Star Wars Holiday Special is rated why are you even still reading this.

Spotlight (2015)

After the credits rolled on Spotlight, I turned to my moviegoing companion and murmured, “That is what I wanted Truth to be.” A few weeks back I took the Cate Blanchett/Robert Redford movie to task for “all the self-congratulation of an Aaron Sorkin screenplay but less of the snappy prose,” and I stand by those words because Spotlight shows us how it’s done, emblematic of everything a journalism film ought to be – taut, gripping, honest, and well-performed.

Spotlight is the horrifyingly true story of a team of Boston Globe reporters (among them Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, and Rachel McAdams) and their editor (Liev Schreiber) who uncover mounting evidence of widespread child abuse in the Catholic Church. I invoke “horror” because of the dispiriting spiral of abuse the team uncovers, learning quickly that the story they’re working on encompasses as many as 87 priests and systemic attempts to cover up the scandal, which only begins to see light when a beleaguered attorney (Stanley Tucci) organizes a class-action suit against the Church.

The very first thing one notes about Spotlight – and indeed my principal motivation for seeing the film – is the impressive ensemble cast who are bound to be competing against each other when the Oscar nominations are announced next month. There’s not a face on the screen who doesn’t already carry a tremendous amount of screen presence from their previous work, and the only unfamiliar face – Brian d’Arcy James – pulls double-time to make up for the fact that he’s not immediately recognizable. The lot of them are doing award-caliber work with characters that are apparently quite close to their real-life counterparts. Keaton and Ruffalo are immensely compelling, particularly when the two butt heads on the story. The screen crackles when Keaton and McAdams go on interviews together, and it is as ever a delight to see Stanley Tucci in another idiosyncratic supporting role as the self-described only Armenian in Boston.

I had a critique formulating at about the midpoint in the film where I felt the characters weren’t clearly delineated enough, that their narrative places could be interchanged without much compromise to the narrative – that, in short, Spotlight was more about the telling of the story than the tellers. Which, to be fair, in a very real sense it is, but it’s also indicative of the slow-burn approach to the characters taken by director Tom McCarthy (he of Station Agent and an acting turn in Good Night and Good Luck, which feels of a piece with Spotlight). Rather than frontload the characterization, we find out more about the reporters’ motivations as the film unfolds. By the end of the film, and I confess this is a clever move, we’re left to reflect on the degree to which what we learn about the reporters influenced the way they pursued the story.

What surprised me about Spotlight was that there really was no “untold story” that the film exposes. It proceeds about how you’d expect – an investigation begins, details are uncovered, the story is published. (There’s one somewhat surprising historical curveball thrown into the mix, one that contextualizes the investigation in a very profound way, one that reminds you just how long ago all this happened.) What is remarkable is just how compelling this manages to be. And I’m returning to the Truth comparison because Spotlight manages its moral outrage without a sense of preachiness and without ever feeling baggy under the weight of its self-righteousness. Instead, its taut simplicity is its greatest strength, and its exemplary filmmaking ought be seen before the screenings fill up with post-Oscar bandwagoners.

Spotlight is rated R for “some language including sexual references.” The film contains in the neighborhood of 10 F-bombs and about twice as many scatological expletives. Though no abuse is ever depicted on screen, we do see survivors speaking frankly about the incidents and the emotional trauma thereafter.

The Good Dinosaur (2015)

The usual disclaimers apply here: I’m a Disney shill, love Pixar movies, and have a fondness for dinosaurs. I tend to cry buckets at each one of these films, etc. etc. Most of this is all still true, though quantitatively fewer tears were shed at The Good Dinosaur than at, say, Inside Out or Toy Story 3. And perhaps that’s emblematic of my reaction to The Good Dinosaur as a whole: it does a lot of the same things well that Pixar movies overall tend to do, but I’m left feeling a little bit less than I wanted.

In a world where dinosaurs never went extinct and instead took up agriculture, young Arlo (Raymond Ochoa) is desperate to prove himself to his family and make his mark on the world. After a storm separates him from his family, Arlo strikes up an unlikely bond with an evolving human he names Spot. Together, the pair has a whole lot of wilderness to cross before they can get back home.

Here’s the thing (and I know that I usually begin a sentence with that when there might be bad news to follow) – The Good Dinosaur is a bit of disappointment in much the same way (though certainly not to the same degree) that I was disappointed by the trailer for the dismal specter of Alvin & the Chipmunks: The Road Chip: “Oh, this again.” I say the difference is by degree, for there’s little more soul-shattering than the looming threat of yet another squeaky-voiced milked-for-its-last-dollar insult to the word “comedy.” But there is, unfortunately for a studio otherwise prized for its innovation, something all too familiar about The Good Dinosaur. There’s a liberal amount borrowed from The Lion King, The Land Before Time (one of them, anyway), and even a bit from Disney’s own Dinosaur only fifteen years back.

This level of distraction, a kind of narrative déjà vu, is never a good sign on film, because it means that the story isn’t holding you as closely as it ought to be. And indeed, The Good Dinosaur retreads quite literally much of the same ground as some of Pixar’s better films – Toy Story and its sequel, Brave, Up, Finding Nemo, and to a degree Inside Out – in that it’s yet another story about someone traveling through somewhere to get home and learning something about themselves in the process. Yes, it’s a tale at least as old as Homer’s Odyssey, but there’s something less compelling about it this time around (I never, for example, noticed until now the repetition in Inside Out of the road story).

Rather than play backseat driver to the film and tell it what it should have done differently, I will say that the film isn’t a failure. It is simply, as the title indicates, good but not great. It’s a testament to the strength of Pixar’s abilities that even one of its less successful films is still quite good. Two things really stand out here, the first of which is the animation, particularly of the backgrounds. The backdrops are visually breathtaking, and it’s worth staying through the first round of end credits just to see these images unadulterated by the presence of animated figures in the foreground. Though the cartoony nature of the characters never quite resolves with the photorealistic settings, there are moments when it’s quite easy to forget that none of what you’re seeing is real; the mountains, skies, and running waters of the film are visually stunning.

Second, the tears. And yet, there are some to be had in The Good Dinosaur, and they’re in wordless sequences – first, when Arlo tries to communicate with the nonverbal Spot, and second, at the end of their journey together. Again, these scenes show us what the studio can do better than most other filmmakers by tugging at those heartstrings in unexpected yet profound moments. The drawing of a circle never felt so emotional before The Good Dinosaur.

It is, as I’ve said, good but not great – worth the watch, certainly, better than most of the animated drivel (do we need, for example, an Angry Birds movie?) ostensibly targeting the same demographic. The Good Dinosaur maintains the visual standard set by Pixar, even if the story never quite rises above the level of “serviceable.”

The Good Dinosaur is rated PG for “peril, action and thematic elements.” There are some mean dinosaurs in here, some bloodless violence involving such creatures, and a few implied dinosaur deaths.

Bonus review! The Good Dinosaur comes packaged with a delightful short named Sanjay’s Super Team. In it, Pixar displays their gift for wordless storytelling in a story about a boy whose love of superheroes comes into conflict with his father’s devout prayers, until the young Sanjay realizes the two are not wholly irreconcilable. Deeply personal, Sanjay’s Super Team is a worthy appetizer – better placed, perhaps, in front of the forthcoming Incredibles 2 – and a real treat for me, because I’m a very easy sell when it comes to both Pixar and superheroes. The video game-inflected animation is a unique addition to the Pixar canon, and its blend of family values and superheroism is over all too soon. Can we get a full-length Sanjay feature?

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (2015)

I’m going to start the review off by saying that I’m making a conscious and very deliberate decision here to review The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 as the second half of what really ought to have been one movie. I’m not going to review Part 1 on this blog, because the two films are irreconcilable to me (like both halves of Kill Bill); I watched both within 24 hours of each other, and I’m disinclined to think of them as two films for a number of reasons which will be elucidated below. Suffice it to say, Mockingjay is a strong and satisfying conclusion to the Hunger Games franchise, even against the misjudged split down the middle.

As the propaganda and military wars against the Capitol rage on, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) stands as the Mockingjay, the symbol for the revolution after her survival in two successive gladiatorial Hunger Games. Katniss, resistant to the manipulations of rebel leader President Coin (Julianne Moore), finds that her friend Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) has been brainwashed by the nefarious President Snow (Donald Sutherland), and she embarks on a mission to kill the man who has ruined their lives.

I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that Hunger Games has been the spiritual successor to Harry Potter in ways that I don’t think Twilight or Divergent ever were. All managed to grab more or less the same demographic by the ears, but only Hunger Games plumbed the same depth of ideas that JK Rowling’s wizarding saga did. (And I’m aware that all but one of them pulled the split-the-last-film-in-two move, as well.) There have been moments like these throughout the franchise, but it’s especially prevalent in Mockingjay that I sat back and realized, “Wow, this is really weighty stuff” – and it’s handled quite deftly and smartly. Questions of war, power, and the power of the image pervade Mockingjay to great effect, and the filmmakers wisely reject any simplification of the novels for a film that is purposefully unsettling.

I must continue to heap praise on Jennifer Lawrence, who adds great credibility to the character of Katniss. For an Oscar winner to continue through a young adult franchise without seeming like it’s beneath her is a creditable move that speaks highly of both her character and her performative abilities. None in the cast does any less of a strong job – Sutherland especially seems to be having a grand time in a veritable mustache-twirler of an antagonist – but Lawrence is particularly noteworthy, in large part because her performance sheds light on two key scenes of ambiguity, frustrating in the novel but abundantly more clear in the film (for the benefit of the spoiler-phobic, I’ll be cryptic – the crucial vote, and the novel’s epilogue). We know precisely what Katniss is feeling in those moments because of the way Lawrence takes her pauses, shoots her glances like an arrow.

The film is, I daresay, deliberately anticlimactic, opting for a more poignant commentary on the nature of violence than a reductive “good guys always win” ending, and for that I applaud both the filmmakers and novelist Suzanne Collins for keeping the text smart. But I can’t help but feel that the effect might have been sharper had Mockingjay not been divided – quite arbitrarily, mind you – in two. Part 1 ends a scene after a cliffhanger reminiscent of the old Batman television show – “Will Katniss Everdeen save her friend? Or will the nefarious President Snow win his war? Tune in next November...” – as if to ameliorate the shock of an abrupt ending; Part 1 tells us Katniss will survive into the next film, but it’s a move that distracts from the fact that the film is bait-and-switching us into returning for another installment.

It’d be fine if each film had its own identity, its own logical starting and stopping point. For a while it seems like that’ll happen – Part 1 seems largely focused on the propaganda filmmaking and the power of the Mockingjay as an image, where Part 2 is the more action-oriented – but the division is, as I’ve said, largely arbitrary, at roughly a midpoint in runtime. The truth of the matter is that Katniss’s move from symbol to soldier would have been more potent within the boundaries of a singular film. A number of elements would have been stronger – President Snow’s declining health, President Coin’s surrender to ambition, the advisory role of Plutarch Heavensbee (the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) – and it would have been frankly less off-putting than feeling the grab for cash.

I know I’ll likely be eating my words when Avengers: Infinity War arrives in its bifurcated form in 2018 and 2019, respectively, but it’s still possible that that pair will manage to feel like two distinct films rather than padded halves of a whole. As for Mockingjay, however, I strongly believe there’s enough substance to comprise a very powerful 150 minutes rather than two respective two-hour films. It very nearly compromises the integrity of the work, which is both potent and important, though Mockingjay is compelling enough viewing that you only begrudge the protraction a little bit.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of violence and action, and for some thematic material.” Part 2 is by far the grimmest of the already grim franchise, with several of your favorite characters meeting unpleasant demises by way of arrows, explosions, and weird sewer mutants. Though the film isn’t particularly bloody, it is almost unbearably despondent in a few scenes.

Jessica Jones (2015)

It took me four days to get through the Netflix-exclusive Daredevil back in April, but this weekend’s release of Jessica Jones only lasted me two days. Not that Marvel has delivered fewer than 13 episodes this time around – same Bat-time, same Bat-channel, true believers. It’s just that I found Jessica Jones more engaging, more accomplished, and more addicting than the already first-rate Daredevil. As wonderful as Marvel’s first Netflix series was, Jessica Jones is the new crown jewel in Marvel’s television stable.

Krysten Ritter stars as the eponymous private investigator, hard-talking and even harder-drinking. Using her remarkable super-strength only when she has to, Jessica picks up the case of a missing athlete (Erin Moriarty), only to discover that the case is linked to an old enemy (David Tennant), whose fixation on Jessica makes him a dangerous foe. Against her instinct to isolate herself, Jessica draws on the help of her old friend Trish Walker (Rachael Taylor) and new flame Luke Cage (Mike Colter), while her lawyer/employer Jeri Hogarth (Carrie-Anne Moss) wrestles with an impending divorce.

I’ll say right off the bat that I think the major reason I rank Jessica Jones more highly than Daredevil is freshness. Not that Daredevil was stale, by any measure – and I should also clarify that my praise of Jessica Jones isn’t at all to denigrate Daredevil; rather, it’s a mark of how much higher Jessica Jones sets the bar, due largely to the character’s novelty. We all had a sense of how Daredevil was going to play out, tracing the simultaneous rise of Hell’s Kitchen’s greatest hero and villain, culminating with... well, you know how these kinds of stories play out.

A few hours into Jessica Jones, I realized that I couldn’t say the same for this show. I know how I wanted it to end, certainly, but I couldn’t guarantee that we’d get the ending we wanted. Indeed, there are a number of twists and turns in the show that I honestly didn’t see coming, which makes for a comparably more enjoyable show in terms of edge-of-the-seat viewing. I don’t want to spoil anything here, but the narrative winds around story beats that are really only possible when a character isn’t caught up in 50 years of iconic stories (because let’s face it, Daredevil has had many long-running arcs to which any adaptation must pay homage).

At the center of it all, you have two extraordinarily dynamic performances from Ritter and Tennant, who get to play off each other much more than Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio, who were kept apart for much of Daredevil. Ritter gives Jessica Jones the hard edge the character needs, distinguishing her from other “strong female protagonists” by emphasizing the brokenness under the surface, a tragedy repressed by alcohol, cynicism, and casual sex. Her character crackles, especially in scenes with Tennant, who plays the sadistic sociopath Kilgrave (known to comics fans as the mind-controlling Purple Man). Tennant is getting cascades of praise for his role as the show’s villain, and rightly so – short of Kingpin and maybe Loki, Kilgrave is Marvel’s new best villain because of how intensely and immediately loathsome he is. And yet – there’s a creepy way that Tennant pitches for the audience’s sympathy, even in light of his casual and frankly terrifying violence; there’s something of Kingpin’s childish tantrums in Kilgrave, but in a way that’s more horrifying for how little he seems to care.

The supporting cast are equally strong, with only Colter’s Luke Cage managing to wrestle the show away from its two leads – in large part, that’s due to Luke being next in line for his own Marvel show, but he also has a unique chemistry with Jessica that makes me think neither standalone show will be getting a second season; rather, I’d put money on a Jones/Cage team-up (following, I’d wager, the comics couple’s quirky courtship). There are winks and nods to elsewhere in the Marvel continuity; the films are kept at arm’s length, but we have allusions to Hellcat, Nuke, Iron Fist, and maybe even Spider-Woman and Gladiator (because, to be fair, how many Melvins are running around Hell’s Kitchen?). But as a piece, Jessica Jones doesn’t feel too tied into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. I think there’s room in the MCU for these standalone stories, which can easily be woven into the larger tapestry later. With Jessica Jones, Ritter is poised to be the next big star of the MCU, and it’s easy to imagine an Avenger turning to her to track down someone, or just to lift a car over her head.

Along with feeling a step away from the MCU proper, there is the matter of tone to consider – by which I mean that Jessica Jones is the uneasiest entry in the ten years of Marvel productions, giving me the feeling of physical revulsion more often than ever. At one point, I literally had to stop and shower, and not just because I’d been in my pajamas for hours at a stretch. This show is much more uncomfortable, more unsettling, and more frank than anything else we’ve seen with a Stan Lee cameo (and yes, he’s in there). Kudos to the showrunners for sticking to a vision and a tone which must have rattled the bottom-line-conscious brass.

Jessica Jones is dark, it’s daring, it’s uncomfortable – and it’s bloody brilliant, television most foul as in the best it is. As the best binges induce, I want more.

Jessica Jones is rated TV-MA. As Marvel productions go, it’s the sexiest; although there’s no nudity, there are some pretty intense sex scenes and frank discussions of rape. Language is fairly salty in the S-words range, but the violence is substantially less graphic than in Daredevil. Psychologically, though, it’s much more troubling.

Spectre (2015)

While Skyfall was for a lot of us the fulfilled promise of the Bond update kickstarted by Casino Royale, a kind of “And we’re back” (as Mark Kermode has, as always, so eloquently put it) Spectre is the second half of that sentence, a sort of “...and we’re here to stay.” To be fair Spectre isn’t the triumph that Skyfall was – recall Skyfall made #2 on my definitive ranking of every Bond film ever, though it’s too soon to rank Spectre. But it’s a worthy successor, a fine if occasionally too personal 24th installment.

After receiving an order from the late M, James Bond (Daniel Craig) follows a trail of criminals to the den of a mysterious figure (Christoph Waltz), heretofore presumed to be dead, and his organization known as SPECTRE. An encounter with an old friend leads Bond to Dr. Madeline Swann, who will help Bond and Q (Ben Whishaw) take down SPECTRE, while the new M (Ralph Fiennes) and his aide Miss Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) work against the surveillance project of rising bureaucrat Max Denbigh (Andrew Scott).

I’m going to go so far as to label Skyfall transcendent – breathtakingly beautiful and tightly narrated, with all the action you’d want from a Bond film without the foolish frivolity toward which the franchise is occasionally prone. It’s so good that I daresay Spectre never could have lived up to it, in the way that Thunderball could never have been as good as Goldfinger. Taken on its own merits, though, Spectre is good enough.

Starting with the pre-credits sequence, a staple of any Bond flick, Spectre doesn’t disappoint. In a long-take opening (whose CGI trickery takes away none of the punch of seeing Bond really do his stuff), director Sam Mendes takes us into the heart of a Day of the Dead celebration, cuing up the thematic content of the film with a lovely bit of eye candy in the form of Bond’s effortless heroics. Like Skyfall’s opener, it moves through a number of sub-setpieces rather quickly, lacking only a snide one-liner to cap it all off.

The rest of the film’s action is top-notch: a car chase through Rome, a fistfight on a train, a ski chase in which neither participant is actually skiing, and then two variations on the escape-from-the-compound trope. All of these play very well within the narrative, striking a great balance between the Bourne-inflected realism of the Craig era and the gentle absurdity we’ve seen in older films, but they’re played to delight, not to strain credulity. Indeed, they serve as nice reminders of what film we’re watching; just when the film starts to take itself too seriously, we’re treated to a nice bit of levity, like Bond surviving the collapse of a building by landing on a sofa.

There’s the rumor – an evergreen, really – that Spectre is Craig’s last outing as Bond. Much as we’ve heard that one before, Spectre does feel in a lot of ways like the end of an era. It pays off a lot of narrative threads from the last three films, including the most delightful amplification of the roles of M, Q, and Moneypenny. Largely absent from the early Craig films, this supporting cast gets a great opportunity to shine in their own subplot, from which Bond is largely absent but which manages to be as compelling as his conflict with Waltz’s villain. If it’s Craig’s swan song, I hope Fiennes, Whishaw, and Harris stick around – the MI6 gang are as interesting as they’ve ever been.

On Waltz: he’s every bit the scenery-nibbler we’d want out of a classic Bond villain, a fine successor to Javier Bardem’s Raoul Silva. There’s an intriguing way that Waltz unites both the campy classicism of the Connery era with a very contemporary sensibility vis-à-vis surveillance and anonymous terrorism. And if this is the last Craig film, it’s clear that the filmmakers are eager to tie it all up in a way that I don’t actually think was necessary. It doesn’t detract from the film, though it is a little distracting how overt this move is. There’s a beat where those who hadn’t recently seen Casino Royale might be a little dizzied by the reappearance of that film’s Mr. White, and there’s an unconvincing move to tie Skyfall into a larger narrative (when it works just as well, if not better, as a Goldfinger-esque standalone).

There’s what I would say is my biggest critique of Spectre (aside from a disappointing show by the film’s soundtrack, with a forgettable title track by Sam Smith and a score by Thomas Newman, who phones it in a little too much, borrowing heavily from Skyfall both in motifs and, in a few moments, in what sound like actual edits from earlier musical cues): the film tries a little too hard, a little too openly, to unite the previous films together. Maybe it’s just the tenor of the earlier films, where there were loose and insignificant attempts to hold the films together; where the Connery era had SPECTRE as a shadowy bogeyman whom, we assumed, Bond was always already fighting, Spectre attempts to make that unifying thread the stuff of revelation, of narrative twists, but there are ways to do that which don’t show the filmmakers’ hand so baldly. Additionally, we’ve been glad to see Daniel Craig as a more personal James Bond, in that his Bond takes things more personally – mourns the dead more willingly, pursues cases more intensely, and even hooks up with Moneypenny (finally!). He’s been a more personal Bond, but Spectre tries to move that more-personal quality out of the realm of subtext and into the arena of the actual plot, with Waltz’s Franz Oberhauser linked to Bond’s past. While this isn’t a bad move for the franchise (and I suspect the filmmakers have their eye on ways to continue this narrative thread), it comes off as largely unnecessary; the subtext was already there, and excavating it to the surface doesn’t actually do much more for the film.

Here’s the thing, though – it doesn’t take away from Spectre. The move toward the much more personal Bond isn’t hamfisted or sloppy; it’s just not essential for this viewer, but what we have is still quite entertaining. There are a number of frankly breathtaking action beats, fascinating developments in Craig’s Bond, who continues to be the most compelling Bond (even if Sean Connery is still a fan favorite), and moments of pure exuberance that remind you why Bond has endured for more than fifty years and twenty-five films (counting, as we ought, Never Say Never Again). It’s no Skyfall, but then what is?

Spectre is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of action and violence, some disturbing images, sensuality and language.” There is the usual quantity of Bond heroics, including car chases, fist fights, and explosions. One character is facially disfigured in an unpleasant way, and Bond makes out with two separate women (the rest is left to implication). One or two S-words (no, Mr. Connery, not swords) are invoked.

Truth (2015)

True-story films about political journalism fall into two categories: insightful historical documents and shallow propaganda. On that continuum, then, Truth falls somewhere right of center – which it would detest to be labeled, I am sure – by falling closer to political agenda than historic insight.

Cate Blanchett stars as Mary Mapes, the 60 Minutes producer who oversaw the controversial story about George Bush’s alleged abandonment of duty during his 1970s stint with the National Guard. Robert Redford co-leads as Dan Rather, the doomed anchor whose commitment to the story (spoilers for real life?) ends up costing him his job. Truth covers the timeline from the story’s pitch in the summer of 2004 through Bush’s re-election in November.

The problems with the film are severalfold. First, to be pedantic, the title. Titles are important, as we know, and to label a story “Truth” is to take on an immense responsibility, a terrific burden. But in the promotional materials, Mapes herself describes the film as “my truth” – a critical difference from the truth, which the film purports to be. Worse, the film trades a great deal in equivocation and shouting down objections – a fine rhetorical strategy, I suppose, were it not for a monologue in which Blanchett decries that same technique.

A similarly false note is rung in that same monologue when Blanchett’s closing speech – which has all the self-congratulation of an Aaron Sorkin screenplay but less of the snappy prose – sneers at the allegations of conspiracy theorists and those who pander to them. Those of us in the audience ought to recognize what Truth does not – it’s speaking about itself in that moment, because it comes on the heels of a soliloquy by Topher Grace in which he alleges that his employer’s parent company Viacom is colluding against Congress with the Bush cabinet to protect its assets, while the film also spins a web of circumlocution around the origin of the documents in question.

Actually, the political stuff, which the filmmakers foreground, is for my money the least interesting material in Truth. I’d have much rather the film teased out more the way Mapes regards Rather as a kind of surrogate father (a Freudian slip near the film’s conclusion, mercifully, isn’t beaten to death), but the film leaves Mapes and Redford apart for a fair amount of their screen time. It’s likely the exigencies of real life at play, Rather having covered other newsworthy events like a hurricane at the time, but it’s evidence that there is more interesting material in the story than the film allows.

Rhetorically, then, Truth somewhat fails to live up to its own title. As a piece of film, though? It’s a little more successful aesthetically, though it’s far from perfect. It’s director James Vanderbilt’s debut, having cut his teeth on scripts for the Amazing Spider-Man reboots, Zodiac, and White House Down – a mixed bag if ever we saw one. Blanchett is, as ever, solid and enjoyable to watch, and the supporting cast (including Grace, Elisabeth Moss, and Dennis Quaid) does a fine job filling out the script. Disappointingly, Redford never quite convinces the audience that he’s Dan Rather; there are moments when he seems to have nailed Rather’s signature drawl, but otherwise it’s hard not to see Redford playing a version of himself – a complaint I didn’t have, incidentally, with Redford in last year’s much more delightful yet equally political Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

In short, I came away from Truth somewhat disappointed by its blatant political stance – a Fox News truck shows up with all the cinematic techniques you’d expect to see accompanying Jack the Ripper’s screen debut – and its attention to more aesthetic matters like its intriguing subplots. But rather than critique the film for what it wasn’t, what I would have preferred it to be, I’ll say that what we got wasn’t the award-season material its producers likely wanted.

Truth is rated R for “language and a brief nude photo.” There are about a dozen F-bombs in the film, as well as a pixelated image from Abu Ghraib.

The Top 10 Things I’m Looking Forward to in The Force Awakens

Without much at the box office to review and having caught up on most of my home viewing, I turn to the future. There’s a new Star Wars movie coming out next month – words I never thought I’d say, but they taste sweeter than ice cream. I’m so very excited about a great many things, but here are my “Top 10 Things I’m Looking Forward to in The Force Awakens.”

10. It’s the start of a new trilogy. Lest we forget, there are two more movies coming down the pike, to say nothing of all the “Anthology” films designed to fill in the gaps between the main films. While much has been made of The Force Awakens as a return to that galaxy far, far away, we must also remember that Episode VII is going to establish themes and plotlines for the next trilogy – and perhaps beyond.

9. It’s not George Lucas. And I don’t mean that as a slight to the man; for all the faults of the Prequel Trilogy, I do feel he’s hugged the cactus long enough, and he’s still the man responsible for birthing Star Wars into the universe. What I mean is, up until now we’ve really only seen George Lucas’s Star Wars, with his authorial hand at the narrative till. I’m excited to see what other voices bring to the galaxy.

8. Stellar space dogfights. In a way, I’m more excited about this one than lightsaber fights. We’ve done the lightsaber thing over and over, but Return of the Jedi is still the benchmark for great space combat. In light of the CGI pixelfest opening of Revenge of the Sith, and with the inclusion of an X-Wing pilot as one of our chief new characters, we’re in for some stellar space fighting.

7. Fun new merchandising. Look, if there’s one thing you’ve learned about me on this blog, it’s that I’m a hopeless shill, an easy mark. I’ve been devouring the new canon novels, spending far too much time on the Star Wars Card Trader app, and delighting in bobbling the head of my Kylo Ren Funko figurine. All of this has gone on, many rightly note, with a pretty hefty spoiler embargo from Disney. Just imagine what neat new doodads I’ll be able to put on my shelf once the movie lands.

6. Opening the puzzle box. Speaking of spoilers, let’s talk about the fact that the movie remains almost entirely unspoiled. We know next to nothing save what we’ve glimpsed in well-edited trailers and gorgeous movie posters. Maybe I’m just adept at dodging those murky spoileriffic corners of the Internet, but JJ Abrams has always been known for his puzzle box approach to filmmaking, keeping his cinematic cards as close to his directorial chest as possible. With the long arm of The Mouse at his side, we’re in for a real surprise come December.

5. Meeting new friends. It’s evident that The Force Awakens won’t just be treading familiar ground. We have a trio of new protagonists in Finn, Rey, and Poe Dameron, creepy antagonists in Kylo Ren, Captain Phasma, and General Hux, as well as the instantly lovable BB-8, heretofore unseen figures, and the overall shape of the galaxy in the wake of the fall of the Empire (if indeed it really fell). With no clue how all this fits together, with the tease that some characters are connected to the Original Trilogy in surprising ways, and with Disney positioning many performers as breakout figures, Star Wars ought to introduce us to a few new stars.

4. Seeing old friends. But of course, The Force Awakens isn’t discarding our holy trinity of science fiction. Luke, Han, and Leia are coming back, as are Chewbacca and that dynamic droid duo of C-3PO and R2-D2. Heck, even Admiral Ackbar is confirmed for a return. (Lando can’t be far behind, right!) It’s been thirty years in-canon, and only a little longer for us in the real world. The Force Awakens has a lot of catching up to do.

3. A new John Williams score. This was very nearly my #1 on the list, and I really can’t undersell just how pivotal Williams’s music will be to the success of The Force Awakens. Even if the film is a catastrophe on the level of Attack of the Clones, it’ll make a brilliant silent film with just the score turned up to eleven. He’ll be remixing the familiar tunes, as the trailers indicate, but I’m equally if not more excited to hear how he brings new characters to musical life.

2. Where is Luke Skywalker? Remember that puzzle box I mentioned? Abrams and company have let nothing slip about the whereabouts of Luke Skywalker, the only surviving Jedi (well, assuming Ahsoka Tano doesn’t make it out of Rebels). We know Mark Hamill is in the film – how could he not be? – but the trailers haven’t given us more than a momentary glimpse at a cybernetic hand which, to be fair, might not even be his. The mystery of science fiction’s greatest hero, and the implication that his absence might be a major plot point, has me all a-flutter.

1. That childlike sense of wonder. Credit the marketing team for this one, but the #1 reason I’m excited about The Force Awakens is that I feel genuinely excited about it. Something of a tautology, I know, but there’s a difference between this and my excitement for the next superhero movie. With the latter, I have a fairly good idea of what’s coming, and my excitement stems from confidence in the direction of whichever franchise I’m financing with my ticket. With Star Wars, the trailers and promotional materials give me a very different feeling, a reminder of why I fell in love with Star Wars at age eight or so, a promise that everything is going to be different but nothing is going to be too far afield. So far, everything I’ve seen of The Force Awakens has been a wonderful blend of nostalgia, promise, mystery, and wonder. Abrams, known for his Spielbergian sense of awe, is a worthy heir to the franchise, and I have the feeling of coming home to that galaxy far, far away.

Despite my obvious enthusiasm, rest assured I’ll be giving this one a fair shake come December. I haven’t made my mind up in advance, and if it’s absolute dreck I won’t flinch to say so. But I’ve got a very good feeling about this.

Crimson Peak (2015)

It’s no secret around these parts that Guillermo del Toro and I have had something of a parting of the ways when it comes to his most recent films. I’m a staunch admirer of his Hellboy films, and I think Pan’s Labyrinth is about as good as it gets when it comes to stylized magical realism. But Pacific Rim (at the risk of reopening that can of worms) left a bitter taste in my mouth. Fortunately, Crimson Peak is a bit of a return to form for del Toro, even though it suffers through a bumpy opening act or two to get there.

A modern woman in the fin de siècle mode, Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) falls for the dashing Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) while finishing her first novel – not a ghost story, but “a story with a ghost in it.” Though her stern banker father (Jim Beaver) disapproves, Sir Thomas courts Edith with everything he’s got. When the two marry and move to Allerdale Hall with Sir Thomas’s sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain), Edith discovers that there are skeletons in the Sharpe closet, ghosts in the ancestral home, and a bevy of other gothic tropes imperiling her very life.

It’s probably better to start with the bad news, because the effect Crimson Peak had on me did something very similar, tempering my exuberance for the film’s climax with a middling-at-best first hour. The problem with Crimson Peak is that it isn’t quite sure whether it wants to be a satire of the Gothic or a wholehearted revel through the genre. We can tell that del Toro is extremely well-read in the Gothic; the film carries with it a virtual checklist of tropes. (Moody castle? Check. Uncomfortably close siblings? Check. A murder/inheritance plot? Check.) But there is at the same time an accompanying sense that the performers are playing their parts a little too earnestly, working perceptibly too hard to convince the audience to play along with the fiction.

Take, for example, one of the worst things a film can do – a long and brutally on-the-nose expository monologue. Crimson Peak has such a one, in which Edith’s father chastises Sir Thomas for his effete and privileged upbringing, something that the coarse hands of a true American could never know. Now, this is a fine subtext, and it’s been played often enough that the audience could probably glean it from a well-crafted scene or two. But del Toro, for reasons that escape me, verbalizes these sentiments with painstaking precision, turning a subtle character motivation into a blunt instrument. This is to say nothing of the unsubtle parallels between Edith’s novel and the film we’re watching, both of which take great pains to tell us that “it’s not a ghost story, but a story with a ghost in it.” Yes, we know, but why does del Toro feel he needs an apologia-cum-apology to enter the genre?

The truth of the matter is that Crimson Peak is at its best when it surrenders wholeheartedly to the Gothic genre and turns into an unapologetic haunted house of horrors. del Toro’s ghosts, grotesquely gory skeletons, are genuinely terrifying, and the jump scares they elicit are first-rate fare for Halloween. What’s more, there’s enough left unspoken, communicated solely by the mood of the film, that Crimson Peak is a fine discussion-prompter once you’ve left the cinema. (And if it’s a dark and chilly night, so much the better!) I am more convinced by Edith’s efforts at detection as she pieces together the myriad mysteries of Allerdale Hall than I am by a comparable effort on the part of her physician (Charlie Hunnam), who extemporizes at length on the Sherlock Holmes books which sit in his office.

Cinema is a medium of showing, not telling, and del Toro proves in the back half of Crimson Peak that he’s a master at it. But it does very much feel like the first hour of Crimson Peak was made by the same man who made Pacific Rim, not Pan’s Labyrinth. Where the former was all sound and pixelated fury, signifying nothing but an orgiastic self-indulgence in digital trickery, the latter served as evidence of a sophisticated and sensitive cinematic eye. Crimson Peak is of two minds about its own identity, but if you can slog through the first half you’ll love the second.

Crimson Peak is rated R for “bloody violence, some sexual content and brief strong language.” The ghosts are skeletal, gruesomely bloody, or both, and there’s a fair amount of other graphic violence in store. There’s a somewhat intense sex scene in which only a man’s rear end is show (the woman keeps on her gown, which is somewhat ridiculous for the number of petticoats it contains). One F-word appears.

Monday at the Movies - October 19, 2015

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.”

Whiplash (2014) – Look, do you need me to be one more voice in the litany of praise for JK Simmons’s tour de force role as a jazz band instructor who pushes his students to the brink of madness? If so, consider yourself adequately informed; Whiplash features a can’t-miss performance from the man you may only know as the newspaper editor from Spider-Man. Equal parts mesmerizing and terrifying, Simmons’s Terence Fletcher is the stuff nightmares are made of; think the Sgt. Hartman of jazz. In fact, at a brisk 100-some minutes, Whiplash might be the most intense film about jazz ever made, leaving me physically shaken in a way that I honestly can’t recall another film doing. I kid you not; I had lingering jitters for at least fifteen minutes after putting the DVD back in its case. I single out in particular an extended drum solo, which sounds far less compelling on paper than in its execution, to which I credit the frenetic editing and Damien Chazelle’s tight directorial work. The unsung hero of the film is Miles Teller, who plays the drumming prodigy protagonist, who appears noir-style in every scene of the film and who does such a credible job of bringing Andrew Neimann to life that you’ll forget all about Fant4stic (as should we all). And without spoiling too much, I’ll say that Whiplash ends in a place of open-endedness, not on a question of fact but one of meaning, one that is guaranteed to provoke discussion and stick with you for at least a solid weekend. Chazelle has created a think-piece disguised as a jazz film with all the ambience of a David Fincher thriller, and if nothing else you’ll appreciate JK Simmons in a whole new light.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

After something akin to an allergic reaction to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, I very nearly gave up on this review series. Equal parts uneven and uninteresting, Order seemed decidedly disorderly – a pun I wish I’d thought up last month. Instead, I forged on; I’ve consumed a lot of lackluster media solely in the name of completionism, but fortunately returning director David Yates seems to have learned his lesson with Half-Blood Prince, which is on the whole much more engaging and unified than its predecessor.

Now in his sixth year at Hogwarts, Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) becomes a closer confidante to his headmaster Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon), who brings Harry along when incoming Potions professor Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent) is hired. Harry soon learns, though, that Slughorn has been hired because he knows valuable information about the dark lord Voldemort. While Harry’s friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) wrestle with their feelings for each other, Harry and Dumbledore pursue the last bit of hidden knowledge needed to defeat Voldemort.

Right off the bat, Yates demonstrates a much stronger command of the visual language of film, establishing in the film’s opening shot the central theme – Dumbledore, having seen firsthand the consequences of keeping Harry in the dark, elects to trust his star pupil. After much of the confusion of Order, wondering what the central throughline was, there’s a pleasant “Aha!” at the beginning of Prince. And indeed, throughout we see Yates communicating silently with his audience, allowing us to glean from the visual that which we need to know. We have very few ponderous monologues or, at the other end of the spectrum, moments of ungraspable speculation; the film tells us what we need to know in a way natural to the medium.

It helps that you have wonderfully expressive yet subtle performances, first by the teenage cast who have really come into their own. Last time I reviewed this film, as a younger man I bemoaned the “angsty teenage romance” that pervades the film. Now that I’m older, wiser, and fresher on the franchise, I see what’s actually happening here is that the actors are (perhaps for the first time) allowed to humanize their characters and give them a few emotions besides stock tropes of “stoic,” “goofy,” and “brainy” (respectively). Furthermore, it’s a treat to see Alan Rickman as Snape and Broadbent’s Slughorn given stretching room for those fine thespians to vivify their characters.

It’s Michael Gambon, surprisingly, who ends up being something of a scene-stealer. Though I’ve never been sold on Gambon as a replacement for the late Richard Harris (I’ve always wondered what Peter O’Toole could have done with the part), he does pretty impressive work with Dumbledore, who’s nowhere near as stern and shouty as he’s been. Instead, we get a pretty close approximation of the Dumbledore from the books, much more contemplative and compassionate, which Gambon layers on as a natural role-reversal from his earlier interpretation of the character. This is the Dumbledore I wish we’d gotten all along, but in light of the way this film ends (I’m being cautiously vague, even though I’m sure this “spoiler” is right up there with Rosebud in terms of a statute of limitations) it’s a much more sobered and thoughtful performance than we might have been led to expect.

The film is overall more focused than the last one, and even though the book split its attention between flashbacks and present-day movement toward the seventh book, the film finds a much more confident identity in its present, giving Harry something very tangible for which to fight while deepening the mythology of the universe. Even the last-minute cliffhanger of sorts, which teases the narrative center of the final film(s), ties into the main theme of friendship and trust (which, actually, links up with the major twist of this film as well). What you have, then, is a much better organized Harry Potter film in which each element is deeply integrated into the main storyline and theme. It is, in short, a much more successful penultimate feature film than I’d presumed possible from Yates. Half-Blood Prince is a full-blood success.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is rated PG for “scary images, some violence, language and mild sensuality.” Spells and their occasionally bloody after-effects, as well as a few creepy creatures and a looming sense of peril at every turn (including one spectacular jump moment near the film's climax), could be objectionable as far as "scary images [and] some violence" are concerned. The snogging in this film ("mild sensuality") isn't much to write home about, though it dominates a lot of the main characters' focus.

The Top 10 Return of the Jedi Musical Moments

In the wake of my most recent semimonthly rewatch of the Star Wars trilogy (that’s the Original variety, naturally), and in anticipation of The Force Awakens this December, I present another Top Ten list.  No, not a Top Ten ranking of the films in existence – the correct answer, by the way, is 5, 4, 6, 3, 2, Clone Wars, 1 – but a more musically minded listing.

The task was arduous, though, and I couldn’t bear to throw that many children to the wolves. Rather than rank the ten best tracks from 797 minutes of movies, I’m going to break this down by film. Here we present the third in an ongoing series of lists, “The Top 10 Return of the Jedi Musical Moments!” (Look at it this way, you’re getting more posts – one for each movie!)

A note on sources:  we’re talking, of course, about the music composed by John Williams and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra. For source/cue division, I’m using both the 1993 four-disc “Anthology” box set and the 2004 two-disc “Special Edition” reissue editions, so track listings may vary for those playing the home game.

10. “Han Solo Returns”
 We start the list off with a track that would have been higher, if only more of it had been used in the film. Williams composed a divine tuba motif for Jabba the Hutt, though you won’t hear much of it in the film. What was used, though, sets the mood well for the slimy gangster’s slovenly den of miscreants, with a nice reprise of “Han Solo and the Princess” when everyone’s favorite scoundrel is rescued by “someone who loves [him].”

9. “The Emperor Arrives”
 Williams is the master of the musical leitmotif, and in this piece we see is skill at blending the old with the new. In an amazing piece of musical storytelling, he begins with a brassy rendition of the Imperial March, which surrenders – as its on-screen embodiment kneels – to the Emperor’s theme (about which, more later). For an introduction to the Emperor, it’s perfect, telling us that he’s scary in a different way than Vader is, but it doesn’t do as well out of context because of its brevity on the soundtrack releases.

8. “Fight in the Dungeon”
The first action cue of the film is a great example of what Williams can do with a small piece of music not oriented around particular motifs. Instead, he turns in a delightful one-off track to score Luke’s battle with the rancor, conveying the creature’s shambolic motion and the carnivorous peril of the scene. Let’s be honest, the original rancor special effects were a little bit dodgy, but Williams’s music, as ever, carries the day.

7. “Victory Celebration”
 For all the changes from the original 1983 release through the Special Edition and beyond, here’s one I genuinely don’t mind and indeed prefer. The “Yub Nub” track, though viewed with nostalgic glasses, is a little hokey even for Star Wars. Williams’s second try, though, paints a musical landscape as the Special Edition cut shows us a more galaxy-wide approach to the end of the Empire. It’s a more world-music finale, one that crescendos nicely into the End Titles.

6. “Parade of the Ewoks”
 Say what you will about the Ewoks – characters made to sell toys, teddy bears that make the film too juvenile – Williams weaves them into the musical tapestry of the universe perfectly. Recalling also his work on the Indiana Jones films roughly contemporaneously, “Parade” introduces the playfulness of the Ewoks with a melodic versatility that fits equally well in an action cue.

5. “The Emperor’s Death”
 For the climax of the film, Williams throws it all against the wall – the Imperial March, the Emperor’s theme, the Force theme – and at least for those of us who grew up playing X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, this track is indelibly imprinted on our minds. It fits brilliantly with that arresting image of the Emperor’s electrified fingertips and with Darth Vader’s final decision in the battle for his son’s soul – and, ultimately, his own.

4. “Luke and Leia”
 Lest anyone think that Williams phoned it in for the trilogy’s finale, “Luke and Leia” might be considered his last great original composition for the Star Wars universe (until, that is, 1999). It’s a soft melody that reminds me of the high romances of the 1940s, only it’s applied to the tender moment when Luke divulges that he and Leia are siblings. It’s reprised when Leia breaks the same news to Han, and it’s one of the more underrated pieces in the film.

3. “Into the Trap”
 Speaking of underrated, this track often gets overshadowed by Admiral Ackbar’s sloshy “It’s a trap!” Undeservedly so – its recent appearance on Star Wars: Rebels (which, by the way, has been doing a phenomenal job of remixing Williams’s work) speaks to its potency as a piece of space action music, its militant opening foreboding the titular track and paying off the much slower rendition as heard in... you guessed it, #2 on this list.

2. “Main Title/Approaching the Death Star”
 It initially surprised me that I didn’t have a hard-and-fast favorite opening sequence from the six films: I can name my favorite film (Empire), favorite bounty hunter (Boba Fett), favorite lightsaber duel (Luke vs. Vader at Bespin), but I hadn’t given much thought to “opening scene.” Hands down, though, it’s this one, which opens with a majestically confident version of the Imperial March, showing us all the pomp of the Empire at its peak in the austere yet incomplete Death Star II.

1. “The Return of the Jedi”
Also known as “Sail Barge Assault,” there’s no question that this is the strongest piece from Return of the Jedi. I mean, it’s in the title! In all seriousness, though, it’s a rousing action track that emblematizes the best of Star Wars – the hopeful triumph of the forces of good against overwhelming odds, a wonderful warm-up for the last great battle of the Rebel Alliance, but a confident and well-choreographed reunion of old friends amid the most celebratory rendition of the main theme. It’s no coincidence that the trailer for The Force Awakens evoked this moment with its iconic bum.... bum... BUM, which I daresay is to Star Wars what that iconic first chord is to “A Hard Day’s Night.”

Hit the comments section to tell me your favorite Return of the Jedi musical moment! And be sure to subscribe up above to make sure you don’t miss my move into the prequel trilogy!